Sunday, May 18, 2014

Godzilla, an anti-environmentalist blockbuster

Godzilla (2014) is a new U.S.-Japanese movie based on the paradigm of the Japanese monster that premiered on Friday in the U.S.

Its budget is $160 million and happily enough for the people behind the team, the investment is going to be repaid sometimes next week, within less than a week. Not bad. On Friday itself, it earned $38.5 million and is likely to get $100 million over the three-day weekend.

I have not seen the movie and I have no idea whether I will like it. But what's interesting is that this is not another movie parroting the intellectually inferior a dishonest "environmentalist" ideology about the man who ruins Nature and may fix it. Quite on the contrary, the movie points out that the alarmists spreading this meme are dangerous psychopaths.

In a huge quarry, they find two MUTOs – radioactive "Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms". It's a punishment for the mankind's reckless behavior towards Nature etc., the environmentalist psychopaths suggest. They prepare a plan to save the Earth from these MUTOs – by detonating some thermonuclear bombs in San Francisco or something like that. Instead, they just murder Nancy Pelosi and thousands of her and their fellow liberals. The true hero of the movie, Dr Ken Wanatabe, knows that Nature and Earth regulate themselves whatever the mankind wants. So he has been convinced for years that there are regulating feedbacks, in this case the Godzilla, which plays the role of God protecting the mankind. He knows that the human arrogance of thinking that we control everything and we have the duty to "fix" what we have "ruined" is only a path to ruining ourselves. So he says "don't do anything", beats the alarmists (in some miraculous way that we may want to learn from him), and saves the mankind from the environmentalist imbeciles. This summary of the plot is probably inaccurate. ;-)

Hollywood is usually painted as one of the ultimate cradles of post-modern, left-wing, hypocritical, kitschy, superficial, feel-good image, naivety, vacuous gestures, and uninformed activism. And of course that it's true to the zeroth order. Many actors and actresses and film directors are participating in similar things because they have been really chosen for their good superficial looks combined with the ability and desire to parrot anything and their otherwise unspectacular intelligence and wisdom (those things may usually be used as a definition of an actor). However, Hollywood is a large town – and industry – so the precise truth is more complicated. There are actually some conservatives etc. (including hawkish American patriots such as Bruce Willis) and I have watched quite many Hollywood movies whose message was that the Big Government is bad and dangerous, among other right-wing ideas.

I have personally no trouble to watch left-wing – even alarmist – movies myself because it's just fiction. For two hours, my emotions may switch to a different world where many if not most truths and even basic moral principles are different than they are in our world. But of course, I switch back when the movie ends. I re-realize that the folks I was watching are not top scientist; they're actors who are stupid as a doorknob. That's true even for ladies like Penny. She is supposed to be a stupid blonde in the sitcom – but Penny is still so much smarter than Kaley Cuoco! ;-) Many people – including Hollywood actors and other celebrities – live in a fantasyland even when they're out of the screen. Not all of them. Gareth Edwards (*1975), Godzilla's film director, is arguably one of the exceptions.

29 comments:

Bryan Cranston is still my "Heisenberg" hero from the serie Breaking Bad ;-).

Lubos, if actors annoy you, watch the videos of Dennis Pennis, a British rude humorist/journalist who kinda insult actors etc. He is bold:http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=you+tube+dennis+pennis+&docid=607991546188663265&mid=7CA2F58DA0ECD2ADF0817CA2F58DA0ECD2ADF081&view=detail&FORM=VIRE2#view=detail&mid=7CA2F58DA0ECD2ADF0817CA2F58DA0ECD2ADF081

I find it hard to take it seriously when the AGW posts are nothing but breathless emphatic rhetoric. I would be genuinely interested in scientific criticisms of the anthropogenic global warming theory. No one wants to hear yet more vitriolic punditry.

I know a retired director of TV dramas who once told me that many actors are stupid. He gave me the example of a party celebrating a smashing success in the Neilsen ratings. People were crowded around the female lead praising her for her "incredibly sensitive" performance. Finally, she said, "Hey, I didn't even know what the character was upset about. I just cried or whatever whenever [director] told me to."

Connecting quantum and classical theory has a long history. The main point is not to prove that quantum has a classical origin but that quantum can be based on classical physics description. Wigner and Moyal theories are examples.

We can do even better.(Vladimir I. Man’kofrom Russian academy of science)

If it makes money, they will make many more. It's not about ideology. It's about the bottom-line. And, let's be honest, most of the latest big budget anticapitalist/green productions have crashed badly.

Well, some were and are(VSL)---Einstein briefly, Dicke, John Moffat, Albrecht, Magueijo...Of course, I disagree with them. Also, Magueijo wrote a particularly nasty popular book that took narcissism and insults to a new level :)

Nevertheless the villains of his piece are rightly still the ecotards.

BTW I wonder if, just for once, the film doesn't have any of those standard uppity, emotionally unstable and violent moronic blacks acting like spoilt delinquent teenagers, along with their usual indulgent dim 'liberal' white entourage tripping over each other in the rush to eat the blacks' shit. Similarly for other ethnic dross. Hollywood is a big promoter of "the other" at whitey's expense.

I doubt it. But I'm certainly not paying to find out. So Fuckzilla.

Talking about Mark Steyn, I can't wait for him to rip that lying, bullying Mikey Mannic's throat out, tear his belly open, trail his guts out into the street for the dogs to eat and then shit on what's left of his carcass. All in a manner of speaking of course.

I also can't figure out why many Physicists seem to think that things are even approximately nailed down, when every time a better telescope is built (~20 years), something is found that was not predicted.

As five year old experimenters learn -with cans and string - one can transmit a signal by cable but it is transmitted at a velocity that is the sort of it's tension divided by the ratio mass/length. So if I tug one end of the cable it will take much more than ten years to affect the other end.

Tom Andersen: This is a really sloppy, utterly stupid way of looking at ignorance. You essentially assume that all questions about Nature are equally known or unknown, and because "something new is found by telescopes" each 20 years, everything is uncertain.

But that's bullshit. Something that is found by the telescopes was never clear to start with - like we don't know even remotely how the particles of dark matter are heavy. But we know other things very reliably. Telescopes won't contradict the basic universal postulates of quantum mechanics even in the next 2,000 years. It is really impossible because those postulates are really as rigid as the mathematical formulae of logic, or something like that. You may misunderstand how it works and why one can be certain about such matters but people who understand things may be certain, anyway.

Curious George's way of counting the ignorance is idiotic, too. We may only know the composition 5% of the average energy density of the Universe but this fraction contains an overwhelming majority of the structure - interesting things to study - that is present in the Universe. And it is not really true that we know nothing about the remaining 95%. We know its density, degree of uniformity or clustering, and so on, and it is very likely that the remaining interesting things to be known may be summarized by as few sentences as some knowledge about the muon, or any other known particle. Or two particle species.

Knowledge and ignorance are not counted in kilograms so it doesn't really matter that dark matter forms a greater percentage of the average energy density in the Universe.

Rather off topic, but I doubt that the film is going to repay its investment that quickly. The commentators usually just compare cost with takings, but of course the takings (tickets sold) are gross of all the costs of running the cinemas, distribution of the film etc etc.

If we assume say $1.50 per ticket actually go back to cover the studio costs, you have to sell 10 million tickets to break-even. The $100 million figure is around 12.5 million tickets, which seems reasonable over three days in the US.

The problem I see isn't that you are able to enjoy the actors / directors / producers output, regardless of the story being promoted, but still understand that it is all "make-believe" (sometimes not even believable fiction!).The problem is the vast audiences, both in the US and around the world, who DON'T understand that it is fiction, and believe the garbage that is spewed in some of these flicks...though I admit that blaming filmmakers for the gullibility of the audience is not quite fair. That's not to say that various celebrities don't have an agenda they are trying to promote...

Yes I understand, but I’m talking about the wave function collapsing to a specific value, and when it collapses, it does not need to travel FTL because it is merely one object. Because the wave function collapsing is instantaneous, and the wave function describes both particles, the very idea of information being transferred is irrelevant?

The wave function is not an object in that it cannot be observed. You are correct that the idea of information transfer is irrelevant but because distance is irrelevant. Reality - as we think of it -imposes a relationship between objects. So observation imposes time and distance scales. The entanglement exists independent of those scales until an observation is made.

Right. If you spend enough time immersed in intellectual environments that require QM, such as the study of atomic or solid-state phenomena, it all starts to come together and the macroscopic world that we live in starts to seem artificial. Every chemical reaction, for instance, involves some degree of quantum tunneling because electrons have to penetrate a potential barrier in order to reach another, usually lower, energy state. Even your car would not start without electrons tunneling from the Fermi level in the spark plug’s cathode into the gaseous fuel-air mixture. Quantum tunneling is totally ubiquitous in everything we do.